Welcome to my very first blog!

Hello there, this is my first experience of blogging so please bear with me! My reasons for doing this is to attempt to raise more awareness in mental health – both how it is perceived by the wider public and how the services offered are changing dramatically – and not for the best in my opinion.

First, a bit about me. I am a Mental Health Nurse and I work for a specialist team within the NHS. My passion is absolutely anything to do with mental health, from why do people experience mental ill health to supporting people to recover and lead the life they want to working intensively to try and understand the mindset of those people with severe and enduring mental illness.

What strikes me immediately is how common mental health problems are (in younger people it is more prevelant than diabetes and 1 in 4 people will experience mental ill health in their lives) and yet despite countless campaigns there is still so much stigma attached and it still appears to be a taboo subject. For me, this is partly down to media and reporting. The first thing to hit the headlines is when someone suffering with schizophrenia kills someone or someone on leave from a hospital stabs someone. If you think about how many deaths occur in a day, a week, a year and then think about how many headines like that you have seen recently, I am sure you will agree it is a tiny percentage. In fact you are more likely to die at the hands of your partner than you are at the hands of someone with a mental illness.

Also, the media do not report when Mr. A was successfully treated and returned to his accommodation to continue living his perfectly peaceful life. Or when a college student graduates in spite of having an episode of psyhosis. Perhaps the public would feel safer if more positive stories were published – but then that’s not news is it?

While I do not condone some of the high profile cases we have seen over the years and my heart goes out to the innocent families who will be forever asking ‘why’? I must say that is about time someone stood up and spoke about mental health as it is – unpredictable and full of risk. You can be working on a ward and risk assessing a patient for some leave, the patient has been settled with no symptoms of psychosis, their behaviour has not been disturbed – so in terms of denying them leave, this is not possible under the mental health act, nor is it right if there is no good reason. However, that patient could be out on leave when he suddenly decides to attack a member of the public. Sad but true, I repeat, you cannot eliminate all risk. I am sure that in certain cases there have been mistakes and lessons learnt on the part of the professionals, but in most cases the act of the patient was completely impulsive and unforseen.

It is about time the NHS stopped wasting time and resources in trying to find someone to blame to appease the public. It’s awful, but you know what, it happens and it is very very rare. There are hundreds of thousands of people walking the street everyday who are on medication for a mental illness but most are more of a risk to themselves than anybody else.

Now, on to the services. There has been a massive shake up in services recently with the emphasis on cutting costs. This makes me uncomfortable because the people who suffer are the very people I am trying to help. Our service has seen 5 (out of 10) staff leave and they have not been replaced. Our team is being merged with another specialist team who work in a completely different way to us and have a completely different client group yet we are expected to work together. More and more importance is placed upon paperwork and every week there is a new section on the computer system that we have to fill in and audit. My time is taken away from seeing clients as I have to spend longer infront of the computer. This again goes back to ticking boxes for essential standards so that someone can be blamed for the actions of a patient purely because they hadn’t updated a care plan in the last two months (yes this really does happen). I feel unable to exercise my own judgement or to take positive risks with people because we are now constantly thinking about consequences if x, y or z was to happen.

A lot of our work was around stigma reduction – going into high schools and teaching yrs 9 and up about psychosis – something that I really love doing. But, I can’t do that anymore as we are understaffed and underresourced and it is important work like this that has to go.

I have been thinking more and more about setting up a private mental health service and am in the beginning of putting this together. It will not just be a hospital, it will be a whole service but it will be run with the patient and recovery in mind, not who to blame if it goes wrong. My service will revolutionise mental health and as my plan develops more I will post more about it. It is time for a shift away from being so wrapped up in policies and guidelines that we lose sight of what we wanted to achieve in the first place. People can and do recover from mental illness but they would do so much more quickly if they felt safe that people understood and were empathetic of them rather than scared.